42 42My soul is tormented with fears! Ah! they are dead! Their swords are red from the fight. O my brother! my brother! why hast thou slain my Salgar? why, O Salgar! hast thou slain my brother? Dear were ye both to me! what shalt I say in your praise? Thou wert fair on the hill among thousands! he was terrible in fight. Speak to me; hear my voice; hear me, song of my love! They are silent; silent for ever! Cold, cold, are their breasts of clay! Oh! from the rock on the hill, from the top of the windy steep, speak, ye ghosts of the dead! speak, I will not be afraid! Whither are ye gone to rest? In what cave of the hill shall I find the departed? No feeble voice is on the gale: no answer half-drowned in the storm!
UPRIVER FROM THE GULF of Mexico port of Mobile, William Rufus DeVane King cofounded the town of Selma, naming it for the city in Songs of Selma, an over-the-top, internationally popular literary fraud.
Purportedly a collection of Celtic texts by an ancient Gaelic bard named Ossian, Songs of Selma was accepted by the reading public as genuine, but it was the fabrication of one James Macpherson, who seems to have dressed folktales up in ludicrously overwrought language. Marking a worldwide literary trend toward kitschy hyperromanticism, the Songs of Selma became a staple of a strain of pseudo-Celtic-nationalist mythology in spite of their bogosity.
King’s family had done so well in the land scramble that they were the largest slaveholding family in the state, and King became Alabama’s first senator in 1819. He was, according to an anonymous campaign biography, “about six feet high, remarkably erect in figure, and is well proportioned.”1 Some in Washington called him “Aunt Fancy” behind his back, while Andrew Jackson is known to have referred to King’s good friend James Buchanan as “Miss Nancy.”2 Tennessee congressman Aaron Brown, in a letter to Sarah Childress Polk, referred to King as Buchanan’s “wife.”3 Buchanan and King were a pair of lifelong bachelors who were not attracted to women, and it was “somewhat common,” writes Robert P. Watson, for Washingtonians and others to refer to them mockingly as women.4 Perhaps they were just good friends, but from our contemporary perspective, they look like a gay couple. And, yes, queerness—or gayness, or call it what you will—existed then, though it was less well understood in James Buchanan’s rural southern Pennsylvania birthplace than in the big cities.
Buchanan and King met in 1834 and moved in together in 1836, maintaining a stable household in Washington. Both had nieces who posthumously burned a number of their uncles’ letters to each other. They domiciled together until 1844, when King left the country to be Polk’s minister to France.
If there had been same-sex marriage with community property, Buchanan could have been a large slaveholder, because King owned over a hundred slaves. Though Buchanan lived in the free state of Pennsylvania, he was from the state’s south, the borderland with slave territory, and he was ardently pro-slavery, to say nothing of duplicitous. “I cannot rely upon his honest and disinterested advice,” Polk wrote in his diary about Buchanan when he was Polk’s secretary of state.5 Polk’s admiring biographer Robert W. Merry calls Buchanan “self-centered, devious, dishonest, and cowardly.”6
The power couple’s plan was for Buchanan to be president and King to be vice president. It went awry: Buchanan didn’t get the nomination in 1852, losing on the forty-ninth ballot to the former Mexican War general Franklin Pierce, with Buchanan thus being edged out by the most pro-slavery New Englander. But King got the vice presidential nomination, apparently in the hope that Buchanan would help out in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. After the nominating convention in Baltimore, New Hampshire congressman Edmund Burke wrote to Pierce, addressing him as “General”: “I think we did right in putting King on the ticket. You know he is Buchanan’s bosom friend and thus a great and powerful interest is conciliated…. The slave states will fall into our laps like ripe apples.”7
The Democrats won, but King was ill with tuberculosis, and he took the oath of office for vice president of the United States from his convalescence in Cuba, a political feat that has not been repeated since. Wasting away, he barely made it home to Selma in time to die, forty-five days after the beginning of his term, on April 18, 1853.
For the rest of Pierce’s term, the office of vice president was vacant.
Even Franklin Pierce’s biographers can’t find much good to say about him. A Jacksonian in politics and a romantic in literary taste, Pierce was the only president from New Hampshire. Once in office, he named his close friend and campaign biographer, the perpetually broke writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the plum post of US consul in Liverpool. In the biography he wrote of Pierce, the New Englander Hawthorne had eagerly stoked sectional tension, disparaging “those northern men … who deem the great cause of human welfare as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions.” (At the risk of redundancy, we will remind our reader that “southern institutions” centrally included the legal right to force-mate adolescent girls and sell the resulting children.)
Hawthorne went on to explain Pierce’s position on slavery: it was God’s problem, not the president’s. He characterized slavery as “one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream.”8
The country was torn in half over slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, the Whig party was crumbling, Southern radicals were organizing to secede, and Hawthorne promised that one day slavery wouldn’t be a problem.
Elected on a strongly pro-Southern platform that included the annexation of Cuba, Pierce named the Mexican War veteran and already-declared secessionist Jefferson Davis as his secretary of war, giving him on-the-job training in the management of armies. For his part, Davis was urgently interested in a southern route for the proposed transcontinental railroad, though it was a disadvantageous route from an engineering standpoint, and he enthusiastically promoted what became known as the Gadsden Purchase, negotiated in 1854 by James Gadsden, the Jacksonian US ambassador to Mexico.
Gadsden was a Charleston aristocrat. His grandfather, Christopher Gadsden, had built Gadsden’s Wharf; a second cousin, Thomas Gadsden, was one of Charleston’s most prominent slave dealers of the 1850s, though there was quite some competition for that title. Gadsden was an old-line Jacksonian who had served in the Seminole campaign. At a time when the secession project was already well under way, the $10 million Gadsden Purchase was the last major acquisition of territory by the continental United States, giving Washington control of what is now the southerly strip of Arizona and New Mexico. The reason for the Gadsden purchase, with its farthest-South-possible location, was the same reason a wealthy South Carolinian’s name was on it: rail shipment would be the only practical way to export slaves from the South to southern California, as well as the best way to bring California gold back. A railroad was needed; the South wanted it.
The Compromise of 1850 that admitted California as a free-soil state had not removed the South’s dream of slavery in a separate Southern California. Far from it: speaking of an elderly slaveowner in 1855 who wished to sell out, Frederick Law Olmsted noted that “he thought of taking them to Louisiana and Texas, for sale; but, if he should learn that there was much probability that Lower California would be made a slave State, he supposed it would pay him to wait, as probably, if that should occur, he could take them there and sell them for twice as much as they would now bring in New Orleans.”9 Olmsted also quotes a politician whose campaign in 1855 argued that “if slavery were permitted in California, negroes would sell for $5,000 apiece.”10 That was, of course, pure conjecture; but it was what slaveowners wanted to hear. With even Mississippi approaching saturation point for enslaved labor, population pressures militated for new territory to sell the ever-increasing human capital into. In other words, the slave-breeding industry was reaching critical mass for unraveling—unless the expansion of slavery territory could postpone the collapse. From California, it would have to expand outward into Asia, and this was discussed on occasion.
Describing the slave-labor “Colony under my lead” he would build in California, Gadsden wrote in an 1851 letter to General Thomas Jefferson Green in San Francisco:
Negro Slavery, under Educated & Intelligent Masters can alone accomplish this:—They have been the Pioneers & basis of the civilization of Savage Countries … Let us feed our own People & add Cotton Corn & Rice to the Gold export … and No power can vie with that which is washed by the Pacific … Our Men could thus at the season for mining be employed in extracting the Gold, while the Women & Boys could raise their food & raiment … [I will] Make our Road as we go by an organised Corps of Pioneers & Axe men & reach California with both Negroes & animals in full vigor to go to work.11
Meanwhile, schemes for expanding the empire of slavery into Latin America proliferated. As president, Pierce managed to remove Buchanan from his immediate sphere of intrigue by sending him to England in 1853 as ambassador to the Court of St. James, where he worked toward the longtime dream of the annexation of Cuba. He traveled to Ostend, Belgium, where he met with Pierre Soulé and Virginia’s John Mason, the former of whom was then Pierce’s minister to Spain and the latter minister to France, to formulate an aggressive document, largely written by Soulé. Published in October 1854, the Ostend Manifesto announced US plans to acquire Cuba—by purchase if possible, but if not, it warned, in a classic piece of Southern hyperbole, “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain, if we possess the power.”
The manifesto also made a different case for the annexation of Cuba, that of self-defense against slave rebellion, invoking the possibility that an “Africanized” Cuba might become “a second St. Domingo,” and arguing that taking Cuba would be justified “upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.”
Bankrolled by Cuban exiles, John Quitman, who by 1853 was the leader of the secret Order of the Lone Star, tried to organize an invasion of Cuba that never sailed. But another filibuster, the Nashvillean William Walker, a great admirer of Napoleon, invaded and took over Nicaragua in 1855. Walker had previously been acquitted by a sympathetic jury of violating the Neutrality Act for taking over Baja California and declaring it the Republic of Southern California. An anonymous correspondent to DeBow’s Review called on Virginians to relocate with their slaves to Walker’s Nicaragua, pooh-poohing the problem of yellow fever and exulting:
Here is a new State soon to be added to the South, in or out of the Union—here is the first piece of Mexico in fact, the whole of which, in a short lifetime, will fall into the hands of the white men of North America, and it behooves you to begin in time to secure your portion of the prize, for you are going to find it no easy task. I speak of Mexico (including of course, Central America in the same destiny) with absolute confidence. The expulsion of the Spanish masters has left that country to the red man—the Spanish Indian—an inferior and incompetent race, and the result is altogether analogous to the result of emancipation in the West Indies, just as the cause is similar. In both instances, the support of the strong will and high intelligence of the white man has been withdrawn, and, forthwith the red man and the black man, liberated but incapable and helpless, have sunk down from the position in which they had been held up and sustained, and lapsed rapidly towards their original and natural barbarism.12
The boosterism reflected the fact that every newly acquired slave territory revalued a slaveowner’s human holdings upward drastically. President Pierce obligingly recognized Walker’s Nicaraguan government in 1856, but Walker was driven out in 1857. He was captured and turned over to Honduras in 1860, where he was promptly executed by the Honduran government.
The great issue of Franklin Pierce’s presidency was his signing of Stephen Douglas’s disastrous Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, as pro-slavery bandits attempted to implement slavery in Kansas through murderous intimidation, with two rival state constitutions, one slave and one free, vying for recognition. The clashes were a precursor of the violence of the coming war over slavery, right down to the lethal participation of the abolitionist terrorist John Brown, who in 1856 was a commander in two battles in Kansas. It was after expressing his outrage in the Senate over a massacre in Lawrence that abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was viciously beaten while seated at his desk on the Senate floor by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks.
Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska act sent shock waves through the North, because in declaring that Kansas and Nebraska could be slave territory, it effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had been the basis of the entire deal between North and South since 1821. In doing so, it cut the fragile tethers of a frayed peace treaty loose.
Pierce left office unpopular, after one term, in 1857.
The oldest living Jacksonian still in a major position of power, the eighty-year-old Roger B. Taney, had been chief justice of the Supreme Court for twenty-four years when he handed down one of the most notorious decisions in the history of American jurisprudence: Dred Scott v. Sandford. The court had been deliberating the case for two years, but it held the decision until a slightly less old Jacksonian, sixty-five-year-old James Buchanan, was inaugurated as president in 1857. It was Buchanan’s fourth try to reach the presidency by appealing as cravenly as possible to the slaveowners’ wish list; this time, it worked.
The annexation of Cuba—which would have been an enormous windfall for slave breeders—was Buchanan’s major campaign issue. Had he been able to do it, he would have joined Jefferson, Jackson, and Polk in the pantheon of territorial expanders. Spain wasn’t about to let it happen. Meanwhile, Cuban agriculture was changing, and a few planters were looking to emulate the US slave-breeding model for sale to their own voracious domestic slave market. A boosterish 1859 article in Harper’s extolled the practice of one:
In former times, before the introduction of machinery, the number of negroes employed was greater, and, in consequence of the short space of time allowed for the manufacture of sugar, the mortality among the laborers was excessive. Ten per cent. per annum used to be a common average of deaths on plantations managed by reckless and unwise agents; in such cases the negroes worked twenty hours out of the twenty-four during the season. Since the introduction of steam the negro mortality has been much less, and the number of hands employed has been largely diminished. A force of a hundred field hands will now suffice to work a very large plantation.
Experience has also shown the mischief of overworking the men. Mr. Drake, of Havana, long since proved that by allowing his negroes a fair amount of sleep and nutritious food, they could not only perform far more work than the hands of his neighbors, but could add yearly, by natural increase, a large sum to his estate. On many estates in Cuba, it is known, though the female slaves are quite numerous, the natural increase is comparatively nothing.13 (paragraphing and emphasis added)
President Buchanan did not acquire Cuba, but he began one of the most remorselessly pro-slavery administrations ever. Buchanan not only knew in advance from Taney what the Dred Scott decision would be; he improperly and without precedent interfered with the decision-making process, pressuring judges. Two days before the decision was announced, Buchanan lied in his inaugural address about not knowing what the result would be. He promised disingenuously that “to their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be,” though he already knew the outcome.14 That was what we now call a “dog whistle”—a message to those who could hear it.
The ruling caused much anger in the free-soil states. Among other improper actions Buchanan took regarding the decision, he lobbied one court member from the North to support the majority ruling so as to make it look like less of a coup d’etat by the South.15 The Dred Scott decision was political hardball; a blatant attempt to remodel American law to conform with the pro-slavery agenda, it far overreached the limits of the case. It was the first overturning of a federal law by the court, the previous Marbury v. Madison having struck down only a single clause. Dred Scott declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.
The case had been making its way up the judicial pipeline since 1842. First it had turned on the enslaved plaintiff Dred Scott, who had been taken by his captor into the free states of Illinois and Wisconsin, and thus, Scott’s lawyers argued, had become free. As the case progressed, it turned on a widow who wanted to keep Scott and his family enslaved; it became more complicated when the widow assigned the supposed ownership of Dred Scott to John F. A. Sanford,* a New York lawyer. Now, before the Supreme Court, Sanford was arguing that never mind that as Scott’s owner he lived in the free state of New York, Scott as a slave was not a US citizen and therefore had no standing to sue. Taney agreed with him, delivering his rambling, expansive opinion on March 5, 1857. In what Frederick Douglass called a “hell-black judgment,”16 Taney held that slavery was a constitutionally protected form of property, as he affirmed the constitutionality of the hereditary perpetuity of slavery unto the nth generation throughout the United States. In his opinion, charged with key points of pro-slavery ideology, he specifically addressed the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal”:
It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.
Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.
Jefferson’s famous phrase was not law. But in drawing on it, Taney explained the common Southern understanding of it, and he did so while ruling for the United States that “negroes” could not be citizens, whether enslaved or free. They had, he approvingly noted, for
more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. (emphasis added)
Dred Scott declared that there was no safe haven in the United States where slavery could not exist; if slaves remained slaves when their masters took them into free-soil states, then all states were slave states. It also meant that free people of color had no access in any state to the courts, to contracts, or to owning property, since they could not be citizens and thus had no legal basis to exist as free people, anywhere in the country.
As the implications of Dred Scott sank in, the question emerged: why not just … enslave them all? After all, women were already slaves, noted Richmond’s George Fitzhugh, a descendant of William Fitzhugh. In the Dred Scott year of 1857, Fitzhugh published Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters:
The husband has a legally recognized property in his wife’s services, and may legally control, in some measure, her personal liberty. She is his property and his slave.
The wife has also a legally recognized property in the husband’s services. He is her property, but not her slave.
The father has property in the services and persons of his children till they are twenty-one years of age. They are his property and his slaves.
After deciding who was and wasn’t a slave, Fitzhugh warned the North that abolitionists were really Communists who were using the slavery issue as a Trojan horse:
Every one of the leading Abolitionists is agitating the negro slavery question merely as a means to attain ulterior ends, and those ends nearer home. They would not spend so much time and money for the mere sake of the negro or his master, about whom they care little. But they know that men once fairly committed to negro slavery agitation … are, in effect, committed to Socialism and Communism … to no private property, no church, no law, no government, —to free love, free lands, free women and free churches….
Socialism, not Abolition, is the real object of Black Republicanism. The North, not the South, the true battle-ground…. The agitators of the North look upon free society as a mere transition state to a better, but untried, form of society.17
That was the kind of thing Southern men said to each other as their butlers brought them brandy, but Fitzhugh went further than most. It was not necessary, he explained, to have a racial boundary. Prefiguring the radical capitalism of Ayn Rand, he saw the “strong” as natural masters of the “weak.” “It is the duty of society,” he asserted, “to enslave the weak.”18 In the Richmond Enquirer of December 15, 1855, he wrote that anyone could be a slave if they were inferior: “Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves … The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command.” Dispensing as it did with the Jacksonian notion of white caste solidarity, that was an extreme position, even in the South, and it was not a widely popular one: the color line was too useful, and too sacred, to be discarded.
But if Fitzhugh was a fringe theorist, he was widely read, and, writes Eugene Genovese, “the Southern intelligentsia certainly appreciated him…. The notion that slavery was a proper social system for all labor, not merely for black labor, did not arise as a last-minute rationalization; it grew steadily as part of the growing self-awareness of the planter class.”19
As the genetic distinction between European and African continued to erode, the skin-lightening process was well underway in the upper echelons of enslaved society. Frederick Law Olmsted had noted in his much-read travel account that in Virginia, “I am surprised at the number of fine-looking mulattoes, or nearly white-coloured persons, that I see. The majority of those with whom I have come personally in contact are such.”20 Travelers’ accounts of Southern slave auctions commonly mentioned seeing one or another “white”-looking person being sold as a “negro.”
As slavecatchers kidnapped free people for sale down South, even white people began to feel personally threatened: if, for example, a white man’s daughter were to be denounced as a fugitive slave, the local lawmen would be required to deliver her to the marshal without so much as a hearing. With the Fugitive Slave Act compelling the deliverance of an accused slave to a slavecatcher without due process, it seemed that there might be no place where free labor didn’t have to compete with slave labor. It seemed that if the Southerners got their way, all labor would be slave labor, whether black, white, or, to use the then-current term, amalgamated.
Slaveowners incorrectly thought that the North would enslave them by making their black slaves into their masters. Increasingly, the laborers of the North correctly thought that the South wanted slavery everywhere.
*The court documents referenced him as “Sandford,” but that was an error.